WWII's Translators: Can Do

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WWII's Translators: Can Do

Five and a half years after 9/11, the American military still sucks, by and large, at speaking Arabic and other Middle Eastern languages. The average grunt – if he's lucky – might get a quick primer on "basic language survival skills." Maybe he'll be handed a set of "pointy-talky cards." Officers at the various staff colleges receive a little more. "It's a huge improvement over what we've had in the past," one Colonel involved in such training tells DANGER ROOM. "But it's not terribly sophisticated."

"It's been a problem that's going to [remain] be a problem,"retired Major General Michael Davidson recently told NPR. "Americans are traditionally poor at foreign languages. And I'm from Kentucky, and we struggle with English. So that's not going to get any better. We can spend money and we can spend time on it. But it's going got some better, but not a lot."

In the autumn of 1942 one of Mortimer's friends in G-2 came to him and said, "We've got to send 205 ordnance officers to China to train the Chinese in the use of our equipment. How can we teach 'em some Chinese?" Mortimer: "How much time have we got?" – "Two weeks." Mortimer reflected a few moments and then told him that he thought it could be done if the Army was willing to take a chance. There was a PFC linguist (Charles Francis Hockett) raking leaves at Vint Hill Farms in Virginia just waiting for such an assignment. Of course, he didn't know any Chinese, but he could learn it faster than his students and could go along on the trip using travel time for organized instruction. Having no other choice and probably thinking that Mortimer was crazy, his friend accepted...

At the end to the mission, on recommendation of the commanding officer, Hockett was commissioned as First Lieutenant... He returned to become Haxie Smith's right-hand man and converted his recent experience into the text Spoken Chinese... We rushed Spoken Chinese into print. I took the first copies over to the Pentagon...

When General Bissell was given a copy of Spoken Chinese he leafed through it and explaimed, "This is what we need! Send 60,000 copies to the field." So we did.